So, I was getting dressed for work this morning and put on a pair of my “large’ pants and they were TIGHT! Argh! The scale has been slowly creeping up a few pounds over the last few weeks. I am the heaviest I have ever been in my life. When I was thinner, I often wondered how people could let themselves get so fat. I would gain a few pounds and immediately increase my exercise and cut back on eating and lose it. I couldn’t understand how anyone could gain 10, 20, or 50 pounds. Now I know. When I started gaining weight a couple of years ago, I tried my exercise and diet routine and didn’t lose anything. I then tried exercising harder and more often – still after 4 months I had nothing to show for it except an injured back. On top of it, I was exhausted.

So, I gave up trying to exercise. And part of my illness causes hypoglycemia when I am stressed – either physically or emotionally. When I get that I just want to eat carbs. It becomes a vicious cycle because then my blood sugar would shoot up and then drop down too low again and I’d have to eat carbs. Since my insulin levels were all over the place, anything I ate would be immediately converted to fat stores. Lovely. There would be some weeks if I was really stressed I would gain 3-5 pounds. And once it was there, it wasn’t coming off.

This summer, I stopped eating sugar and drinking wine for about 6 weeks. I lost 4 pounds in the first two weeks and then stopped losing. I started taking some new medication and after a month, I started having the hypoglycemia again and put the 4 pounds back on in a week. *Sigh* Since then, I haven’t been able to have the willpower I had this summer to stop eating the carbs and the weight is creeping up.

As far as exercise, I started walking during lunch. The first few times I walked, I felt like I was dragging my feet through quicksand. I added some magnesium to my daily doses and cut back on the medication I was taking (increasing it seemed to make my symptoms worse) and was able to pick up the pace a bit. But my legs are still incredible twitchy after just walking for 30 minutes. I also have bursitis in my hip and that limits my activity until I get it under control.

I’m struggling with what I should do now. I’ve changed my medication recently and am getting some more tests done in a couple of weeks, but I can’t afford either financially or emotionally to gain anymore weight. I find myself avoiding anything that might tax me at all physically or mentally. I consciously limit how much I do around my house – cleaning, straightening up, etc. so that I don’t get to the point of being tired. I think about doing yoga or something more strenuous, but then I decide not to in case it exhausts me or causes some other type of “injury” like bursitis. I brought home two bags of groceries last night and had to talk myself down from having a panic attack about putting them away because I was worried that I wouldn’t have room in my freezer for some things and that I would have to clean it out and I just didn’t have the energy to accomplish that.

It is really frustrating to be fighting with what I think I need to do and what I am brave enough to do. I also struggle with a “why bother’ attitude since nothing I do is going to work anyway. I know how some people gain so much weight now. It really is a battle that you just eventually give up on.

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One response to “Mind Over Fatter”

“I know how some people gain so much weight now. It really is a battle that you just eventually give up on.”

But a lot of people who give up never explored all the options for victory, i.e. talking seriously to a doctor and finding out exactly where the problem lies, and changing -even a little- their eating and exercise habits. I think you’re on the right track now, by seeing a new specialist about the thyroid treatment.

As far as being “brave” goes, I’ll be standing beside you to help in any way I can, even if it’s just believing in you.